Image is from this SCMP article.
Much of the analysis below is sourced from Michael Roberts' great website.
Japan's ruling parliamentary coalition, consisting of the LDP (purple) and it's junior coalition partner Komeito (in light pink) have lost their ruling majority. They have ruled post-war Japan for almost its entire history. The LDP is currently led by Shigeru Ishiba after Kishida stood down due to a corruption scandal, and ties to the Unification Church.
While geopolitical factors (over the cold war between the US and China, etc) may have played a role, by far the biggest reason for this result in the poor economic conditions over the past few years. Inflation has risen and real wages have fallen, with little relief for the working class via things like tax reductions. While inequality in Japan is not as extreme as in America, it is still profound, with the top 10% possessing 60% of the wealth, while the bottom 50% possess just 5%.
Shinzo Abe previously tried to boost economic performance through monetary easing and fiscal deficits, while Kishida ran on a "new capitalism" which rejected Abe's neoliberalism and promised to reduce inequality. Nothing substantial has resulted from all this, however, other than increasing corporate wealth. Innovation continues to fall, and domestic profitability is low, resulting in decreasing investment at home by Japanese corporations. Labour productivity growth has only slightly picked up since the mid-2000s and is falling again. The rate of profit has fallen by half since the 1960s, and Japan has been in a manufacturing recession - or very close to it - since late 2022. In essence: there is no choice but between stagnation or decline.
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Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Since everyone's talking about that alleged comedian's racist joke about Puerto Rico being a garbage patch, and I can't think of an interesting discussion topic about Japan:
What strategic value does Puerto Rico currently represent to empire? Previously, a staging ground to place American bases in the Caribbean near Cuba was an absolutely critically important point in the Cold War. As US-Cuba relations cool down, and as the Puerto Rican debt crisis and failure to recover electrical infrastructure from 2017's hurricane Maria post privatization of the electric grid, it seems like our value to empire is reduced. Puerto Rico receives more money in federal funds every year than we produce with our entire manufacturing sector, and the usual culprits for embezzlement, Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE) make up a comparatively very small portion of the economy. Previously, I had concluded that the reason the US keeps us around as a colony was just that, the strategic value. But how is it realized?
Follow up question, how could whatever strategic value Puerto Rico has for the US, in the event of a successful PR independence movement, be leveraged against US empire?
Edit: the claim that the federal funds are greater than the manufacturing GDP is entirely wrong actually, I misremembered that from when I had looked this up before and skimmed the sources and came to the wrong conclusion. I just checked and GDP from manufacturing is around 5x federal funding. Still, there's a huge debt problem that's being handled via austerity instead of economic development. I doubt there's too much potential for development in a country with an enormous brain drain problem and inflated US dollar wages, at least under the colonial status quo. So it still begs the question, what's the plan long term?
If Puerto Rico were independent it could start doing deals with China which the US doesn’t want, I read a whole book about that once which I can’t remember the details of super well but maybe the book would interest you.
America’s Last Fortress: Puerto Rico’s sovereignty, China’s Caribbean Belt and Road, and America’s National Security
By Alexander Odishelidze
That's brilliant and exactly what I was looking for, thank you! Found it on libgen.is if anyone is reading this in the future.
No problem. The author is definitely a lib who wrote it from a pro-US perspective as a warning basically, like “if you don’t stop treating Puerto Rico like shit they’re going to leave you for China” but if you can look past the ideology I think it’s got some good info.
Yeah lol I noticed. I'm 3 chapters in. I am wary of a few of the author's blind spots, but I have to cut him some slack because he does admit that the scenario where China buys PR is still superior to the status quo.
Puerto Rico is basically a colony of the pharmaceutical industry. It's #5 overall globally in pharmaceutical manufacturing and the majority of the top selling drugs in the US are produced there. It provides pharma companies a way to pay third world labor prices to manufacture drugs while being able to avoid any import restrictions in the US, skirt a lot of labor laws, and get a ton of tax breaks from the island.
Puerto Rico might be peripheric in the economic grand scheme but that has value too. You ask what is the long term plan for a quasi-country with a brain drain problem, but when it comes to outskirt provinces sometimes the plan is to be brain drained forever. I don't know if Puerto Rico has natural resources or how much of a real estate market it can develop, but at the end of the day we are talking about the US economy here and what matters is how much of that can be used as collateral to generate debt.
That said, you yourself recognize that economic goals don't necessarily matter. Puerto Rico is territory and states do not let go of those. It's an island that is close to Cuba (I mean, so is Florida), and its at the mouth and heart of the Caribbean. It's close by to Venezuela and Suriname. Even if the US didn't need a base there, at the end of the day Puerto Rico is a part of the world that doesn't even need to open an US base in order to rule it from afar.
Since you might be from the island, could you explain the whole kerfuffle surrounding statehood? From what I understand is might be less straightforward than an outsider like me thinks.
That's what I was hoping some egghead who's read 10x as much theory as me would explain to me, lol. The situation is, there are three options: Colonial status quo (free associated state with an austerity enforcing financial oversight board, like a little IMF just for us), statehood, and independence. Support for the colonial status quo has collapsed. Support for independence is mostly prevalent in the diaspora. Support for statehood is what's most prevalent across the board locally, but especially among the bourgeiosie and petit bourgeoisie, doubly so for the class of Americans who moved to the island. The federal government will never allow statehood to happen, because as you pointed out, a quasi-country is of economic utility and offers a marginal opportunity for a lot of sectors that need to operate within US borders but still have relatively low wages.
I don't have a sufficient explanation for why the repeated failures of the annexationist movement (the pro-statehood party has been in power since 2016) haven't resulted in increased support for independence. In our upcoming elections, the pro-statehood party is tied with the pro-independence party, yet the pro-independence party has taken a neutral stance towards the status issue because there simply is not enough support for independence locally.
This is what I have issue understanding. Yeah, I guess if you're puerto rican diaspora you face discrimination in the mainland and so you develop some feelings towards the colonial status quo. But even so I'd expect that a growing diaspora would just intensify links with the mainland, and ultimately create a strong voting block towards statehood and any form of economic subsidy. Not independence. If anything I'd expect Puerto Rico's material conditions to suffer with independence.
The reason the diaspora supports independence is pretty simple: they're the young and educated block.
Yes, most likely in the short term the end of the colony would bring hardship with it since we mostly benefit from imperialism, despite being a colony. The economy here was never meant to be self-sufficient and we'd likely struggle to achieve self sufficiency, much like Cuba. But that's the main reason I asked the question, we wouldn't end up alone, we'd likely be very useful allies for BRICS, if they adopt a more proactive role in the future, to project power closer to the US. So I think there is some possibility that an independent PR could act as a proxy for them, and have similar benefits to what it has today, but without being a US colony.
I'm not so sure they are/will cool down though. PR is also important to keep Haiti in check. It is a vital point of US power projection in the Caribbean
I meant since 1991, certainly they're tense now relative to under Obama, but they've cooled down since Cuba has necessarily attempted to bridge the gap with the US.
I agree that there is not a cold war level aggressive attitude from US, like a bay of pigs invasion 2.0 or something. But US is definitely trying to consolidate its position around Cuba to not give it any breathing room. Guantanamo bay exists for that reason too.
Tax haven